BritDee, Contributor
A note found on Mr Christoulas’s body explicitly confirmed that his suicide wasa desperate response to the life of poverty he faced, due to EU- andIMF-imposed “austerity measures” that had caused his standard ofliving to plummet.
“Thecollaborationist Tsolakoglou government has nullified any chance ofmy survival which was based on a decent salary that for 35 years I alone(without state support) paid for.
Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamicreaction (although if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be thesecond after him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life,so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.
I believe that young people with no future, will one day take uparms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like theItalians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Piazza Loreto in Milan).
Pensions and benefits have been cut by up to 25%, salaries and public servicesslashed, whilst taxes have been raised and unemployment is high, as the Greekpeople are made to suffer for debts incurred following years of complicitybetween corrupt officials and global loan sharks like the IMF.
Diseases including HIV and malaria have reportedly risen sharplyin Greece due to the collapse of the economy, and police data suggeststhe suicide rate has increased by 20% in the last two years.
That we are seeing hardship and unrest in manycountries is unsurprising, considering that deprivation and “the IMFriot” are written into the very plans of the global financial elite.
THE FIRST STEP:
This involves the privatization of a nation’sindustries, with which corrupt politicians are often all too keenly complicit,due to the lucrative commissions on offer.
Thisis “capital market liberalization”, when speculative foreigninvestment capital flows into the country in real estate and currency, but canas rapidly be withdrawn at the first sign of trouble.
Then,”to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, theIMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%”, whichhas the effect of slashing property values and industrial production, anddraining national treasuries.
TheIMF then implements step three: “market-based pricing”, effectivelyraising the price of food, water, gas and other essential commodities. Asreported by Palast:This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitzcalls ‘the IMF riot’. The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is,’down and out, [the IMF] squeezes the last drop of blood out of them. They turnup the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,’You’d almost believe the riot was expected. And it is. WhatStiglitz did not know is that Newsnight obtained several documents from insidethe World Bank. In one, last year’s Interim Country Assistance Strategy forEcuador, the Bank several times suggests ~ with cold accuracy ~ that the planscould be expected to spark ‘social unrest’.
Such riots cause a flight of capital and government bankruptcy,meaning the country’s remaining assets can be picked off at absurdly cheapprices by foreign investors; there are always “lots of losers but theclear winners seem to be the western banks and US Treasury”.
Thisis WTO-, IMF- and World Bank-dictated “free trade”, where globalcorporations move in to monopolize the newly opened markets.
The “IMF riot”: coming soon to a town near you.
This article first appeared at Resistance Radio.
Brit Deeruns an independent online radio station called Resistance Radio, whichbroadcasts daily news, views and analysis challenging the lies of our corruptpolitical and financial leaders, and the controlled corporate media, at http://www.resistradio.com.